(no subject)

[jfb]

Remember when I used to post about Iraq all the time? Well, I'm still not doing that. But Baghdad Burning--well written by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman--is. LJ feed is baghdadburning.

While I've got the syndication page open, I might as well share a few other external blogs I read from LiveJournal:

• Talking Points Memo (talkingptsmemo), political commentary from Joshua Micah Marshall, who wrote this article about the invasion of Iraq.
  
• Body and Soul (bodyandsoul_new), more political commentary and questioning, often informed by a religious perspective.
  
• Fluxblog (fluxblog), daily (pretty much) illegal (I assume) MP3s of songs the author likes (today, a song by the Dandy Warhols), and Waking Ear (wakingear), a log of "what song I had in my head when I woke up in the morning".
  
• The War Against Silence (twas), not a blog but a weekly column of (mostly) music reviews.

RSS feeds can be flaky: Some of them have partial text or only headlines, some of them don't include markup like links and images, and sometimes they just get stuck and stop updating, and sometimes they get unstuck and come in a flood. But even the minimal ones are useful as reminders that there's new stuff on the site that you can go and read.

Comments

[michaelpop.livejournal.com]

thank you for the links. fluxblog and twas are going on my friends list right this second.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I would too, but more people need to add them before I can afford to add them both. Sort of a Catch-22 though... There should be some sort of waiting list mechanism.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Well, the TWAS feed is only useful on Thursdays, and it looks like Fluxblog needs a kick... maybe they'll be more popular by the time they'd do you any good. Catch-22 indeed.

[pot80.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm the guy who does Fluxblog - I don't understand this syndication thing, I didn't even know my blog did that up until about ten minutes ago. I don't understand - does there need to be a certain number of people subscribing to the rss feed for it to work? I'm totally baffled about this right now.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Hi!

There are at least two ways an RSS feed can work. The best way is, the software that manages your blog can provide one. As far as I can tell, blogspot does that for some blogs but not for others. It might be that you could flip a switch and turn it on, but it might be that you'd have to pay extra for it.

The other way is, someone else's software can periodically fetch the HTML version of your blog, parse it and transform it into RSS for other people to download. There are a few services that do this--I (apparently unsuccessfully) set up a feed for your site from blogstreet.com. Since these things don't have access to the raw data, they can be unreliable.

Anyway, if it were working, it would allow people to read your blog from their LJ friends lists, or from other RSS aggregators. I'm not sure how to make it work, though, since I'm not sure what the problem is.

Meanwhile, I can read it from your site, I just won't get reminded to do it.

Nice blog, by the way!

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the bit about number of people subscribing was for my friend Doug. Syndicated feeds cost "points" to read, and the more people read a feed on LJ, the lower the point cost. Doug doesn't have many points, so if more people were subscribed, it'd be more "affordable" for him.